In his famous essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," published in Partisan Review in 1949, when he was only twenty-four, Baldwin announced his determination to reject the pattern of protest that a Negro writer in America was expected to follow. Instead of depicting the black man as "merely a member of a Society or a Group" who has been condemned by the white oppressors to poverty and ignorance, Baldwin chose to understand him as "something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable." (p. 73)
In that bold refusal to be manacled to the racial shibboleths of the "protest novel," Baldwin even felt free, during his expatriate years in France, to write a novel about white homosexuals, Giovanni's Room, in the first person, if only to prove that he could do without the black-and-white chessboard on which black fiction played out its predictable despair. Yet Giovanni's Room was an act of bravura, not an interesting novel. Baldwin's true and magnificent voice could be heard in his essays and in autobiographical stories like "Notes of a Native Son," his poignant memoir of the summer of 1943, when his father died during a bloody riot in Harlem. Even after he returned to America in the early 60's, in eager response to the civil-rights movement and the rise of black nationalism, he seemed, in the lamentative reflections about race of The Fire Next Time, to speak out of the privacy of his mind and heart rather than as the "voice of his people." Although it prophesied a terrifying apocalypse, the essay was distinguished by its lucid dignity. It was, however, the last time he would keep his distance from the anger and hatred he had warned against in his precocious attack on the protest novel.
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